Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino (Domino)

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Still living by their debut’s mantra, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, Arctic Monkey’s new long-player, Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, is bereft of stadium guitar riffs, laddy swagger or LA rocker confidence. Instead, Alex Turner and his simian cohorts play louche lounge music, nestled at the back of an empty lobby bar – the Overlook Hotel springs to mind.

There is a sense of weightlessness to the music, composed by Turner on a piano gifted to him by his manager for his 30th birthday, and played in the style his dad taught him 20 years ago – all fun-but-cheesy jazz stabs, heard most predominantly on opener, Star Treatment.

The band recorded the album as one, in a room. Within the simple, spacious arrangement, vintage keyboard flourishes and dry drum licks give space for the meandering melodies to nestle.

Like Tanx-era T-Rex, She Looks Like Fun whimsies then stomps its way through the album’s second side. If you end things in slow waltz-time, like here on the warm The Ultracheese, the desperate beauty of Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide cannot not be recollected.

While it’s easy for these sometime muzak-tinged songs to differentiate themselves from one another, time spent with the lyrics launches them into orbit. Take on board Pulp’s nota bene – “please do not read the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings”, and you enter a world of strange, cosmic isolation.

Set in and around the title track’s Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, lunar existence and life on earth has taken a turn for the worse. As Turner’s lyrics both allude to and exemplify, the best science fiction helps us understand and move through the dystopian themes of now (”it’s all getting gentrified” from Four Out of Five)

It also (re)introduces new concepts, such as ‘Information Action Ratio’. First coined in 1985, the idea of having too much information to know what to with is used on Four Out Of Five to lambast today’s ‘ask Google first and unequivocally accept the first answer’ way of thinking.

Interesting that a band whose success was based on the power of Internet 2.0 should now be questioning its entire rationale, but Arctic Monkeys have always been contrary, so why stop now? Turner peppers solitary narratives with sarcastic cheekiness “the exotic sound of data storage” (on the awesomely titled The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip); but he also points a direct finger at the people on the vacuous end of social media “Good morning. cheeseburger. snowboarding. finally I can share it with you” (She looks like fun).

While this lyrical palette might be, at times, ivory tower, when they are placed gently back into the music (and literally, as the original vocals Turner did on his own were apparently not a patch on the room recording, so were used instead) the melodies suddenly really ear-worm.

If it’s ever going to be played regularly, and over and above your favourite other Arctic Monkey’s album, this is an album of multiple plays. Delivered in headphones, it’s a seedy, aural lapdance in a club that you think about more when you’re not there.

Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino (Domino) is out in stores

Simon Todd

 

The 13th Floor
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